The future of Two Moons MUSH
May. 14th, 2004 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperThis is for all you folks on my Friends list who have any current stake in the future of Two Moons MUSH--and heck, any of you former TMers who have fallen out of playing on the game but who might have any chance whatsoever of playing on it again. If you know folks who are TMers who aren't on my Friends list, also, please feel free to pass the link to this post around. I am interested in getting as much input on this issue as possible, for the sake of bringing it around to the rest of the Staff. Because here's the thing, folks: Two Moons is a Dead Mush Walking. We have been for years. We're at a critical, all-time low in player population, with no sign of this changing any time soon. We have several fundamental things wrong with the game's infrastructure as it stands, which have continued over the years to make it very difficult to both attract new players and keep them.
Because of these things, the Staff has scheduled a MUSH-wide meeting to be held at 1pm Pacific time, 4pm Eastern on Sunday, May 23rd. We plan to, at this meeting, put forward the following question to the player population:
"What should be the future of Two Moons MUSH? Should we shut down? Should we restart? And if we should restart, to what degree should we do it?"
Please read over this post and let me know your thoughts, and vote in the poll at the end. If you are not an LJ user, you can't use the Poll mechanism, but you CAN leave a comment on the thread, so please feel free to do that if you need to. Bear with me--this is a VERY long post, with lots of LJ-cuts, but this is a huge issue that needs serious consideration if the game is to continue to survive. Thanks in advance for your patience, all. :)
Here are some of the long-term chronic issues the game has, which the Staff is thinking could be helped with a restart:
1. Ridiculously difficult to get new characters started.
2. Most of the elf tribes are both too insular and too far apart from one another to RP with each other on a regular basis; moreover, travel is not really terribly IC for a lot of the tribes, culturally speaking, if you try to pay at least passing attention to what they do in the books. (E.g., the Wolfriders being quite happy to hang out for several thousand years in the same quiet little Holt.)
3. Humans are absolutely boring to play in the early stretches of the Elfquest timeline, because practically nobody wants to be playing the big mean human
hunter whose only function is to kill elf NPCs. Trolls are almost as boring to play, because even though they have the technological advance, nobody wants to play them because they're ugly. ;) And while the Staff does acknowledge that on an Elfquest game, most players are going to want to play elves, the other races do need to still be considered for a properly well-rounded game. And for those few, rare players who do want to play in the other races, we need to be able to provide them with an interesting framework in which to do so.
4. There is no cohesive global story for the MUSH, or even a cohesive direction that we're taking it in. This in turn makes it difficult to give tribes a direction to go in to structure their own plots. At the same time, many players are apathetic and/or determined to RP in their own little corners of the MUSH, so recent attempts to provide global tinyplots for folks to participate in (e.g., my tinyplot with the Vraeyans from Sunholt, e.g., the Zalehrin monsters plot, e.g., the current plot going on with the magic-using twins Imriel and Ryriel) have not gone as well as one would hope.
5. Applying for the Book Characters is extremely daunting to many new players, who take one look at having to deal with not only EQ canon that's relevant to our timeline but ALSO what those characters have done on the MUSH, which is a big pile of data to deal with. I've been trying to mitigate this by making it easy to get to Timeline events and logs that feature a given Book Character, but still.
6. While it has been slowed down in the last few years from 12:1 to 6:1, the current timescale on the MUSH is considered a problem at least by some, and may be actively interfering with ability to play for those who have limited RL schedules. If you can only log on once or twice a week, a fast time scale makes it harder for you to keep up.
There are other issues, but these are some of the biggest ones.
The first option the Staff is considering is whether it's possible to fix much of what's fundamentally wrong with the game without taking the drastic step of a restart.
Pros: Does not require people to give up established characters, bail on current plots, and abandon all previous continuity.
Cons: Requires coming up with ways to manipulate the current IC environment to fix chronic issues, many of which might not really be fun to play at large. For example, we know from Elfquest canon that most of the Book Character tribes are quite happy to live in the same little isolated spot for a few thousand years as long as they're undisturbed, so unless we launch some sort of major, continent-destroying natural disaster that'll probably kill off a lot of inhabitants of Iceholt anyway, very little is going to force our current tribes to move closer together and deal with one another long enough for that to become the norm rather than the exception.
In this scenario we completely reset the game, and I mean COMPLETELY. All previous roleplay on TM is declared null and void for purposes of the new timeline. We choose a new point in the Elfquest timeline from which to start play, most likely at a point where the humans are Iron Age or better so as to give them enough tech and culture to make them interesting to play, and pick up from there. All Book Characters and their tribes are reset to clean canon states, and we add in a small number of non-canon tribes to satisfy player demand. (Since we do know that the Book tribes are NOT adequate to satisfy player demand when we have a reasonable number of players, and it would not be IC to stuff several hundred elves into three or four tribes.)
Pros: Starting over from ground zero has already made at least one player perk up to me in pages, just for the prospect of having clean histories for the Book Characters alone. New players would also not deal with the daunting prospect of slurping up 12+ years of roleplay continuity for any tribe they want to join, either. All players would be on the same level playing field again, because everybody would be having to start over. A complete restart would also completely open the entire canon timeline for possibilities, as well as the entire world of Abode. We have plenty of opportunity to select a time frame and a location that will maximize player ability to have characters be forced to deal with one another.
Cons: Many veteran players who are still on the game or who might consider coming back may well be upset at the prospect of completely abandoning characters and tribes that took years to build. We would have to completely rebuild the MUSH. We would have to identify what non-canon tribes to include in the new timeline, get people to run them, and have those in place.
In this scenario, we maintain established Two Moons MUSH continuity, but change IC locations. While we have heavily established what's been going on on Iceholt for the last 10,000 IC years, what's been happening elsewhere is open for debate. The MUSH could move focus to Sunholt (which could bring Vrae into play as an already established human civilization with better tech levels than what's on Iceholt) or Hearthstone (which is where Shards takes place, and as part of the backstory for Vrae I'd included that their farther-ranging ships had reached the islands at the very southern end of Hearthstone).
Pros: Allows players the possibility of maintaining previous characters if they're given a way to move said characters to the new location. Does not force us to abandon 12 years of RPed continuity which may be near and dear to many hearts. (Not to mention that it's actually kind of cool to be able to say that we've had a cohesive IC history for that long, which is not a claim that many if any games can make.)
Cons: In order to allow for the possibility of maintaining previous characters, plots would have to be devised to allow those characters to move. For example, the Raft Elves might be forced to migrate westward over the ocean. Or the Palace might be employed as a way to get the elves the heck off of Iceholt, and if you want to be part of the Great Migration, get yourself into the Palace.
Counter-Pro: (Actually, a big organized plot like that WOULD be pretty keen to RP...)
Pros: Could allow for keeping established tribes in their familiar environments, but with the freedom to change those environments enough to give the tribes new challenges to RP. If we zoom forward enough in time, this would also allow the humans of Iceholt a chance to bolster their tech levels and become more interesting to roleplay for new players.
Cons: Depending on what kind of timejump we did, some players might have to kill off their characters or devise reasons to stuff 'em in wrapstuff. We would have to decide what happens in the intervening time between where we leave off and where we pick up again, identifying such things as any major overall cultural changes on Iceholt, climate changes, etc.
In this scenario we would keep part of the previously established Timeline and just roll back to a given point from there.
Pros: Allows keeping certain levels of continuity.
Cons: Arguably is telling the same story over again in a different way. :)
Still with me? Good! Okay, folks, here's that poll I promised!
[Poll #293634]
Also, folks--if you have anything to say about any of these issues, do please feel free to leave comments on this thread, especially if you can't make the meeting. What gets said here WILL get relayed to the rest of the Staff. I will also enable Anonymous posting on my journal so that if you really feel the need, you can come and post your thoughts even if you don't have an LJ account, and even if you do and don't want to identify yourself. Talk to me, people. TM needs to hear from YOU!
Because of these things, the Staff has scheduled a MUSH-wide meeting to be held at 1pm Pacific time, 4pm Eastern on Sunday, May 23rd. We plan to, at this meeting, put forward the following question to the player population:
"What should be the future of Two Moons MUSH? Should we shut down? Should we restart? And if we should restart, to what degree should we do it?"
Please read over this post and let me know your thoughts, and vote in the poll at the end. If you are not an LJ user, you can't use the Poll mechanism, but you CAN leave a comment on the thread, so please feel free to do that if you need to. Bear with me--this is a VERY long post, with lots of LJ-cuts, but this is a huge issue that needs serious consideration if the game is to continue to survive. Thanks in advance for your patience, all. :)
The Problems at Hand
Here are some of the long-term chronic issues the game has, which the Staff is thinking could be helped with a restart:
1. Ridiculously difficult to get new characters started.
2. Most of the elf tribes are both too insular and too far apart from one another to RP with each other on a regular basis; moreover, travel is not really terribly IC for a lot of the tribes, culturally speaking, if you try to pay at least passing attention to what they do in the books. (E.g., the Wolfriders being quite happy to hang out for several thousand years in the same quiet little Holt.)
3. Humans are absolutely boring to play in the early stretches of the Elfquest timeline, because practically nobody wants to be playing the big mean human
hunter whose only function is to kill elf NPCs. Trolls are almost as boring to play, because even though they have the technological advance, nobody wants to play them because they're ugly. ;) And while the Staff does acknowledge that on an Elfquest game, most players are going to want to play elves, the other races do need to still be considered for a properly well-rounded game. And for those few, rare players who do want to play in the other races, we need to be able to provide them with an interesting framework in which to do so.
4. There is no cohesive global story for the MUSH, or even a cohesive direction that we're taking it in. This in turn makes it difficult to give tribes a direction to go in to structure their own plots. At the same time, many players are apathetic and/or determined to RP in their own little corners of the MUSH, so recent attempts to provide global tinyplots for folks to participate in (e.g., my tinyplot with the Vraeyans from Sunholt, e.g., the Zalehrin monsters plot, e.g., the current plot going on with the magic-using twins Imriel and Ryriel) have not gone as well as one would hope.
5. Applying for the Book Characters is extremely daunting to many new players, who take one look at having to deal with not only EQ canon that's relevant to our timeline but ALSO what those characters have done on the MUSH, which is a big pile of data to deal with. I've been trying to mitigate this by making it easy to get to Timeline events and logs that feature a given Book Character, but still.
6. While it has been slowed down in the last few years from 12:1 to 6:1, the current timescale on the MUSH is considered a problem at least by some, and may be actively interfering with ability to play for those who have limited RL schedules. If you can only log on once or twice a week, a fast time scale makes it harder for you to keep up.
There are other issues, but these are some of the biggest ones.
Option #1: Fix the Game With Its Current Environment
The first option the Staff is considering is whether it's possible to fix much of what's fundamentally wrong with the game without taking the drastic step of a restart.
Pros: Does not require people to give up established characters, bail on current plots, and abandon all previous continuity.
Cons: Requires coming up with ways to manipulate the current IC environment to fix chronic issues, many of which might not really be fun to play at large. For example, we know from Elfquest canon that most of the Book Character tribes are quite happy to live in the same little isolated spot for a few thousand years as long as they're undisturbed, so unless we launch some sort of major, continent-destroying natural disaster that'll probably kill off a lot of inhabitants of Iceholt anyway, very little is going to force our current tribes to move closer together and deal with one another long enough for that to become the norm rather than the exception.
Option #2: Complete and Total Restart
In this scenario we completely reset the game, and I mean COMPLETELY. All previous roleplay on TM is declared null and void for purposes of the new timeline. We choose a new point in the Elfquest timeline from which to start play, most likely at a point where the humans are Iron Age or better so as to give them enough tech and culture to make them interesting to play, and pick up from there. All Book Characters and their tribes are reset to clean canon states, and we add in a small number of non-canon tribes to satisfy player demand. (Since we do know that the Book tribes are NOT adequate to satisfy player demand when we have a reasonable number of players, and it would not be IC to stuff several hundred elves into three or four tribes.)
Pros: Starting over from ground zero has already made at least one player perk up to me in pages, just for the prospect of having clean histories for the Book Characters alone. New players would also not deal with the daunting prospect of slurping up 12+ years of roleplay continuity for any tribe they want to join, either. All players would be on the same level playing field again, because everybody would be having to start over. A complete restart would also completely open the entire canon timeline for possibilities, as well as the entire world of Abode. We have plenty of opportunity to select a time frame and a location that will maximize player ability to have characters be forced to deal with one another.
Cons: Many veteran players who are still on the game or who might consider coming back may well be upset at the prospect of completely abandoning characters and tribes that took years to build. We would have to completely rebuild the MUSH. We would have to identify what non-canon tribes to include in the new timeline, get people to run them, and have those in place.
Option #3: Same Timeline, Different Location
In this scenario, we maintain established Two Moons MUSH continuity, but change IC locations. While we have heavily established what's been going on on Iceholt for the last 10,000 IC years, what's been happening elsewhere is open for debate. The MUSH could move focus to Sunholt (which could bring Vrae into play as an already established human civilization with better tech levels than what's on Iceholt) or Hearthstone (which is where Shards takes place, and as part of the backstory for Vrae I'd included that their farther-ranging ships had reached the islands at the very southern end of Hearthstone).
Pros: Allows players the possibility of maintaining previous characters if they're given a way to move said characters to the new location. Does not force us to abandon 12 years of RPed continuity which may be near and dear to many hearts. (Not to mention that it's actually kind of cool to be able to say that we've had a cohesive IC history for that long, which is not a claim that many if any games can make.)
Cons: In order to allow for the possibility of maintaining previous characters, plots would have to be devised to allow those characters to move. For example, the Raft Elves might be forced to migrate westward over the ocean. Or the Palace might be employed as a way to get the elves the heck off of Iceholt, and if you want to be part of the Great Migration, get yourself into the Palace.
Counter-Pro: (Actually, a big organized plot like that WOULD be pretty keen to RP...)
Option #4: Maintain Two Moons MUSH continuity, keep our location on Iceholt, but change time frames by X number of years.
Pros: Could allow for keeping established tribes in their familiar environments, but with the freedom to change those environments enough to give the tribes new challenges to RP. If we zoom forward enough in time, this would also allow the humans of Iceholt a chance to bolster their tech levels and become more interesting to roleplay for new players.
Cons: Depending on what kind of timejump we did, some players might have to kill off their characters or devise reasons to stuff 'em in wrapstuff. We would have to decide what happens in the intervening time between where we leave off and where we pick up again, identifying such things as any major overall cultural changes on Iceholt, climate changes, etc.
Option #5: Same Timeline, Roll Back to Earlier Point and Restart
In this scenario we would keep part of the previously established Timeline and just roll back to a given point from there.
Pros: Allows keeping certain levels of continuity.
Cons: Arguably is telling the same story over again in a different way. :)
Still with me? Good! Okay, folks, here's that poll I promised!
[Poll #293634]
Also, folks--if you have anything to say about any of these issues, do please feel free to leave comments on this thread, especially if you can't make the meeting. What gets said here WILL get relayed to the rest of the Staff. I will also enable Anonymous posting on my journal so that if you really feel the need, you can come and post your thoughts even if you don't have an LJ account, and even if you do and don't want to identify yourself. Talk to me, people. TM needs to hear from YOU!
